


Grief and Hope and Memories

by queueingtocomplain



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Rumbelle Secret Santa, post 3x11
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-20
Updated: 2013-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-05 08:04:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1091558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queueingtocomplain/pseuds/queueingtocomplain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rumbelle Secret Santa gift for alltheshinies on tumblr.</p>
<p>Prompt: 'Gifts from other people'</p>
<p>Belle's memories of the good times keep her going in the weeks after Rumple's death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grief and Hope and Memories

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alltheshinies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alltheshinies/gifts).



> Not sure how good this was in terms of relevance to the prompt, but I hope that you enjoy it!

It was a silver night. 

The sky was clear, and the light of the full moon drifted serenely down, to glisten on the beginnings of a frost that had settled across the grass, and the tops of the trees that ringed the clearing. The stiff breeze was enough to keep tent walls fluttering and tree branches swaying, enough to keep an icy chill in the air.

She had forgotten her cloak, Belle noted somewhere in the back of her mind as she began to shake with cold, sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, a little way from the camp. She must have left it on her sleeping mat in her desperate need to see the open sky. Or maybe she had left it because if she was busy thinking about the cold, she might be able to think about Rumple a little less.

Rumple…

Another gust of wind, and the tear tracks began to freeze on her cheeks. She couldn’t really feel them anymore. Not for at least the past half hour. Her feet were bare too. That must be why her toes had gone an odd purple colour in the frosty grass. She had loved frost as a girl, loved to watch the sunlight shimmer across it and hear it crunch under her feet and hope that maybe snow was on the way. The Marchlands as a rule had been too warm for snow, but Belle would never forget the winter when she was seven and it had been so cold that the marshes had frozen over. People said that it was the good fairies battling the evil Dark One that had caused the foot-thick layer of snow, but Belle hadn’t cared then. She had only cared about snowball fights with Gaston, and building the biggest snowman that she could. Together, they had managed to bring it inside to get warm and have tea and toast with them by the fire. But he had melted, and she had cried, and vowed to find a way to bring a snowman inside someday, to honour his memory. Every winter she had sat by her window and hoped that it might snow, so that she could start on her life’s mission. 

Then the ogres came, and winter didn’t mean snow anymore. It meant that the villagers starved when their grain stores were destroyed and harvest was still six months away. It meant that the soldiers, who came to be nursed in the Great Hall of the castle when there was nowhere else for them to go, had frostbite as well as gangrene to treat. It meant that the ground was too hard to bury the dead. Winter was to be endured, not anticipated. Every winter became a struggle for survival. It had been as the days grew shorter and the air grew colder once again that they had realised that they might not see another spring. It was then that they decided that they must use try their most drastic option, their last chance. It was then that they had called for the Dark One.

Belle wasn't quite sure when she stopped shaking with cold and started shaking with sobs, or when the sobs became audible, but she was suddenly aware of the noise that she was making when a heavy cloak suddenly settled across her shoulders. She tried to pull it tighter around herself but her fingers were sluggish and wouldn’t respond. The coarse wool itched on her bare shoulders, and it smelt of wood smoke and slightly stale sweat; she missed washing machines and detergent. Belle tried to bite back her next choked cry, but it slipped out through her numb lips, and an instant later Baelfire was crouched down beside, wrapping his arms around her as well as his cloak.   
‘Jesus, Belle! Your skin feels like ice!’ He pulled her into a tighter embrace as she trembled, with grief or cold or both, because who even knew anymore?  
‘Couldn't sleep. Needed to see the sky.’ It was a struggle to form the words in her head and to shape them properly, but her head was beginning to clear now that a little warmth was seeping into her bones. 

‘Nightmares.’ His voice was heavy, not questioning but a simple statement of understanding.

‘Uh huh.’ She paused, about to close up again, when she reminded herself that this was Bae. If anyone understood how she felt, it would be him. ‘I see it. Every time that I try to sleep, I see it. I see him’.

‘I know.’ A silence stretched and hung heavily between them. ‘Me too. It used to be falling down the portal. Now it’s this.’ He shivered a little, and Belle frowned. 

‘You should take your cloak back. You’re cold.’ She tried to tug it off, but Bae just pulled it around her tighter.

‘I’m cold? You’re still half frozen.’

‘I needed to see the sky.’ They sat together for minutes that seemed to drift away into an age before Bae finally spoke up again.

‘Granny says that it’s going to snow soon.’

‘Oh. Ok.’ She glanced towards the huddle of tents clustered around the fire where Abigail and Frederick sat, keeping watch. ‘Who’s on patrol?’

‘David and Ruby,’ he replied, gazing without seeing into the darkness of the woods. ‘I just finished my shift. We were looking for another water source, ‘cause it looks like the stream might freeze over soon.’ 

More silence, heavy and cold and suffocating. They both had words trapped up inside them, but to share those words, to release them… it would be a vulnerability. If you were broken, how could you expose the crack which could shatter you? What if bravery didn’t follow doing the brave thing?

It was Baelfire who finally spoke, and Belle kept her eyes firmly fixed on the ground. Not the sky. The sky used to be her dearest friend, after she escaped the asylum, and now it was on the brink of betrayal.

‘We used to go sledging. We couldn’t afford to buy one, but he built me a sledge when I was five, and again every time I outgrew them. There was a hill just outside the village, and we’d spend the whole day there, just the two of us. I used to think that it would be okay, that if we just stayed together, everything would be okay.’ He was staring at the ground as well. It hurt him to share as well. If he was brave enough to share, she could be too.

‘I don’t want it to snow,’ she mumbled, as much under her breath as she could, but knowing that the only other sound was the rustling of leaves, and the crackling of the distant fire, and that he would hear. ‘It snowed at the Dark Castle. He brought my snowman inside and kept it whole for me.’ The words were out, and there was no taking them back, and it hurt, but here came the memories, tumbling over one another in their eagerness to wound, eagerness to soothe.  
***  
Rumplestiltskin had found her one afternoon in the kitchen, bent forwards over the counter with her face pressed against the window as she watched the whirling flurries of snow that battered the glass. The first snowfall had been on the ground when she had arrived, but it had melted by the time they had pursued Robin Hood, when their relationship had changed from master and maid to something altogether less tangible. Her warm breath kept fogging up the cold window, and it was as she wiped off the condensation for the umpteenth time that a shrill giggle startled her. 

She jumped, spinning around and standing bolt upright. It might even have been a vaguely elegant movement if it wasn’t for the part where she smacked her head against the corner of a cupboard. Teeth clacking together and pain shooting through her skull, Belle had clutched her temple and cried out, pulling her hand away to find a smear of blood on it. 

She’d barely had time to blink before Rumple was standing right in front of her, closer than he’d ever been of his own volition before. He slid his fingers (fingers that she had thought about in far more ways than was proper) against her scalp as he parted her hair to examine the wound, and when he took yet another step closer, close enough to feel his breath against her ear as he encouraged her to bow her head, she couldn’t quite tell if the whimper that escaped her was an indicator of pleasure or pain. ‘Now, now, dearie,’ he murmured, and gods, his voice was low and rough, and an unsettling warmth pooled low in her belly. ‘Can’t have you damaging yourself, unable to work. If nothing else, I want my side of the deal to be intact, and whole.’

He lifted her chin again, and they merely stared at other, breathing as heavily as they dared. How long did they stand there for? The passage of time seemed suddenly irrelevant when she could watch the way the light from the kitchen fire make his skin shimmer and almost glow, or how his wavy hair looked so soft resting against his collar, making her fingers just itch to stroke it. Still without uttering a word, Rumplestiltskin raised a hand, which began to glow purple, causing her to try to step backwards in slight alarm. His other free arm slid around her waist, gently tugging her back towards him, the arm loose enough that it would be easy to escape if she so wished. Such a pity that she didn’t so wish.

'There, there dearie.' He pressed his hand to her head again, and it prickled with warmth. 'All better.'

'Thank you.' Her tongue felt heavy in her mouth, and she wondered for a wild moment whether his tongue felt the same, whether he was looking at her eyes or flushed cheeks or parted lips or even her heaving chest-

Crack!

One of the logs on the fire gave a sudden loud crackle, and they leapt apart, and the moment was over as quickly as it had begun. His eyes closed themselves off again, and knew that the strange intimacy was gone and locked away once more.

'Thank you,' she repeated, a little more firmly. His hands fluttered briefly as he gathered his words.

'No matter. As I said, I merely wish to extract maximum value from my investment. Rather difficult to do if you bleed to death on my kitchen floor.' He was still blinking a little faster than usual, and he was circling the pad of his thumb against his forefinger - he seemed to do that a lot when talking to her.

'Oh!' she cried suddenly as she realised why he had come down here. 'I'm so sorry - I'm late with your tea, aren't I?'

'Well, I did give you ten minutes grace before I came to find you. Is the snow really that distracting?' Belle frowned, and glanced at the clock. She was at least twenty minutes late. Did that mean...?

'How long were you standing there for? She blushed heavily as she realised what kind of view she must have given him, bent over the counter.

'I believe that I asked a question first, dearie,' he blustered. 'The snow. Why so fascinating?'

‘It doesn’t snow in the Marchlands,’ she replied, ‘and I, uh, was hoping that when the blizzard stopped I could go outside and see it properly.’ He cocked his head to the side, and she suddenly felt the need to ramble on. ‘I mean, uh, only once I’ve finished my duties. And it doesn’t look like it will stop before it gets dark, so I’ll probably have to wait until tomorrow at least, although tomorrow is laundry day so I might not even have time then, but that’s okay because I suppose that the snow lasts longer up here in the mountains-‘

‘Oh, look,’ he interrupted, cutting her off mid-sentence. ‘It’s stopped.’ She whirled around, staring out of the window in shock. Where only moments before had been a blizzard thick enough to completely obscure any sight of the gardens, now the view was one of serene tranquillity, covered in a thick layer of blinding whiteness.

She turned back around in confusion. ‘But…’ He smirked at her, and a slow smile spread across her face. ‘Thank you.’ The third thanks was the most sincere, and his own smile turned into a full on grin. 

A sweeping hand gesture and a plume of purple smoke later, she was wearing the green cloak that he had given her all those weeks before. Still, she was only in her short blue dress, and she wasn’t sure if the cloak would be enough to protect her from the cold of deepest winter in the mountains.

As if reading her mind, Rumple (and when had she begun to think of him as Rumple?) said, ‘It’s enchanted, y’know. It’ll always keep you as warm as you need to be.’ Belle was a little shocked. For someone who always insisted that all magic came with a price, he had just lavished her with it, with no suggestion of any possible future deals or favours. Surely a lifetime of servitude wasn’t worth more than saving the entire Marchlands from the ogres; not worth enough to put her in credit. So was he paying the price himself? For her?  
Belle hardly had time to think things through before she made up her mind, and reached forwards to grab Rumple’s hand. Just as startled as he had been in the library, he stared at her.

‘What is it, dearie?’

She bit her lip, and didn’t miss how his eyes fixed on it. ‘Come with me.’

‘What?’

‘Build a snowman with me.’

‘I-‘

‘Please?’  
Dumbly, he let himself be led out of the kitchen door to the grounds. Belle was utterly overjoyed at the snow, just tossing large handfuls around to revel in the feeling. Eventually she settled down to make her snowman, and although Rumple mostly stood back and made sarcastic comments that she stuck her tongue out at, he did help her position the spheres on top of each other, and conjured her buttons and a carrot to decorate him. She was just putting the final touches to it when something cold and wet collided with the back of her head. Shrieking, she turned to see Rumple smirking at her, half a dozen snowballs levitating around his raised hand. Belle narrowed her eyes and ducked behind the snowman while she scooped together an arsenal, loudly announcing that this meant war. 

He won easily, with magic at his disposal, but she took particular satisfaction in the one that struck the back of his head, melting and trickling down his neck. They wound up lying on the ground, giggling and too worn out to anything but smile at each other. Eventually Rumple turned his gaze to the snowman, and asked what was quite so important about making one. She told him about the snowfall when she was seven, and her vow to bring a snowman inside. 

‘Why didn’t you say so, dearie?’ He raised one eyebrow, and she stared at him, hardly daring to hope.

‘Could you? Could you really do that?’

‘As it happens, I can.’ Another spiral of purple magic, and he was holding a top hat which he extended to her with an extravagant gesture. ‘This was gifted to me some time ago, and I’ve found no use for it.’

‘A gift? Not part of a deal?’ She couldn’t help but be sceptical; who (except maybe her, said the little voice at the back of her head that she fought) would give the Dark One a gift?

‘I believe he wished to be rid of it. A similar model caused a great deal of disruption when the snowman came to life,’ he said. ‘But this one should merely preserve it for as long as you wish.’

Tentatively, Belle took the hat and placed it on its head. Rumple clicked his fingers, and it vanished in a swirl of magic. 

‘He can join us in the Great Hall for tea.’

Belle could hardly believe that her dream was coming true, that she had honoured her childhood vow, but there it was, sitting proudly in front of the fire without a hint of melting. And she was happy, she realised with tears springing to her eyes with the sheer joy of it. She was happy with Rumplestiltskin.

***

She had been happy with Rumplestiltskin. So damn happy that it hurt her to remember it now. He was gone. He was dead, and he never coming back for her. He had sacrificed himself to save them all, but she couldn’t help but wish that he had lived, and that Regina and Snow and Charming and even Emma had died instead. She hated herself for thinking it, but she had lost her True Love, and none of them had cared. Only Bae. Only Bae understood. 

‘Can I give you something?’ His voice startled her out of her reverie. 

‘What?’

‘Can I give you something? I think that it’ll help you sleep. You need to sleep.’ Bae was trying to look after her. That wasn’t right. He was Rumple’s son; he was her son-in-law, maybe not in formal vows but she hardly cared about the distinction. She should be looking after him. She just didn’t know how.

Slowly, they made their way to their feet, and then slowly back to camp. Bae (Neal, she should probably call him Neal, but he was Baelfire too, he had always been Baelfire to Rumple, and thus to her) ducked into tent to fetch whatever it was that he thought would miraculously let her sleep. She hadn’t slept properly since That Day. 

He emerged with a wood and string contraption that she vaguely recognised.

‘Is that a dreamcatcher?’ she asked.

‘Yeah, it traps the bad dreams and only lets the good ones through. I made it myself.’ She was touched, and resolved to pretend that it works, however ineffectual it may be.

There was nothing left to say, nothing that either of them could fully express about the extent of their loss, so they awkwardly parted ways and she returned to her tent, hanging the crooked and obviously handmade dreamcatcher above her bedroll. She couldn’t settle, so she went through her usual routine of thinking happy thoughts about Rumple until she cried herself to sleep.

***

She was in a strange place, which seemed to be made entirely out of shadows; shadows of people and shadows of trees and cliffs and mountains and animals. She simply wandered, wondering if she would ever see another splash of colour and life in this place.

It was unfairly abrupt, in the end. One second she was utterly alone, the next, there he was in front of her. They both just stared for a moment, before rushing to embrace each other, laughing with relief when they discovered that they could touch in this strange netherworld. She could perceive his body, just about, but not what he was wearing. All that was clear was his face, and she took full advantage of the presence of his lips. 

When they eventually pulled apart, she gasped, ‘This is real, isn’t it? This is more than just a dream? Is it some other realm?’

‘I think so, sweetheart,’ he murmured against her lips. ‘Some side effect of the Dark One’s curse. It doesn’t like self-destruction.’

‘I’ll save you,’ she stated, and it wasn’t a promise, wasn’t a vow. It was fact. She’d make it true whatever it took. ‘I’ll bring you back. I’ll find a way.’ 

He was crying, and she kissed the tears off his cheeks, finding herself in the unusual situation of being the one with the power. He reached up to cradle her cheek.

‘I love you.’

‘I love you too.’ 

There was no time in this netherworld, so they simply stayed together until Belle woke into the light of a brand new day, with a new sense of hope and purpose.

She would save him.


End file.
